Integrity Syndicate

The Core New Testament Series

Two volumes. One core.

The Core New Testament Series brings the apostolic core of the New Testament back into focus in two companion volumes: The Core New Testament, a recovered text of the earliest apostolic witness, and The Case for the Core New Testament, the scholarly argument behind it. One volume gives you the text; the other shows, step by step, why that text deserves to stand at the center.

The series proceeds from the conviction that the New Testament canon is not a uniform inheritance. It genuinely preserves the apostolic witness, but its writings do not all stand at the same distance from the source. Weighing the historical, literary, and textual evidence, the series identifies Luke-Acts, the letters of Paul, and the primitive kerygma — the proclamation the apostles actually preached — as the writings nearest the apostolic foundation, and asks what follows for how the rest of the canon should be read and weighed.

Volume I — The Core New Testament

The Core New Testament presents the earliest recoverable apostolic witness as a concise scripture for reading, study, and devotion, restored from the oldest known manuscripts. It comprises three parts:

• The Gospel to Theophilus — a reconstructed text of Luke’s Gospel with selected passages from Acts, restoring the most primitive attainable form of the Lukan narrative;
• The Book of Paul — excerpts from Acts alongside all of Paul’s epistles, brought together in a single, unified presentation of the apostle’s life, mission, and teaching;
• The Kerygma — the earliest recoverable form of the apostolic proclamation itself.

As we seek to uncover later developments in the Christian tradition, including the traditional canon, it is important to have an alternative core canon and kerygma that we can affirm. That is what The Core New Testament provides: the most defensible and reliable witness to primitive apostolic Christianity.

Read & study it free at CoreBible.app →

Volume II — The Case for the Core New Testament

The companion volume, subtitled Uncovering the Canon, presents the full scholarly argument. Across twelve chapters and more than four hundred notes, it clarifies the key terms, traces how the canon actually developed, and examines the literary relationships among the Gospels — making the case for the priority of Luke, weighing the standard arguments for Markan priority, and assessing the remaining canonical Gospels. From there it identifies Luke-Acts and the letters of Paul as the foundational apostolic authorities, recovers the kerygma underlying the written texts, and proposes a principled classification of the New Testament writings by their proximity to the apostolic core — closing with what that distinction means for how Scripture is read, weighed, and contested today.

The full text is free to read on this site, chapter by chapter, alongside six clusters of supporting research articles on the Gospels and the canon.

Start reading — overview & chapters →

Reading the series

The volumes can be read in either order. Start with The Case if you want the argument first — the history, the evidence, and the method. Start with The Core New Testament if you want to encounter the text itself and return to the argument as questions arise. However you begin, the two volumes are designed as one project: the recovered text, and the case for it.